Board of Temporal Arbitration

The Board of Temporal Arbitration is a standing tribunal of the Curatorial Board, constituted to hear disputes in which two or more parties advance incompatible claims regarding when a thing occurred within the Tower. It is not to be confused with the Board of Temporal Affairs, whose responsibilities, by the ruling recorded at Affairs, Ruling 9, did not overlap with the Board of Temporal Arbitration's, nor with the Board of Concordant Arbitration, to which appeals lie on points of application only. The Board's jurisdiction is chronological, not procedural. It determines sequence. It does not determine merit.

Establishment

The Board was established in TY 4412 under Annex 6 of the Fourth Concordance, following the prolonged dispute known as the Collation of the Sixth Winter, in which two scriptoria on Floor 2180 submitted irreconcilable inventories of the same three hundred crates and neither could prove which inventory had been written first. The Librarians declined to rule on the inventories themselves, observing that both were accurate, and instead convened a panel to rule on their order.

The panel's finding — that the second inventory had been written first, and the first inventory had been written second, and that this arrangement was regular — established the Board's characteristic method: it does not ask what happened, but in what order. The finding is preserved as Form 1 of the Board's Standing Register and is cited in nearly every subsequent opinion.

Procedure and the Six-Month Presumption

Parties petition the Board in writing, naming the events whose sequence is disputed and the intervals claimed between them. The Board sits in rotation across floors whose numbers it declines to publish, on the ground that publication would permit parties to time their petitions to favourable panels. Petitions are heard in the order received, except where the order received is itself disputed, in which case the Board hears the dispute about the order before hearing the petition — a recursion it has twice declined to resolve.

The Board's working presumption, set out in Regulation 14 and reaffirmed in the Seventh Addendum to the First Concordance, is that any two undated events separated by a documented interval of fewer than six months occurred in the order most convenient to the Tower's cataloguing. Where the interval exceeds six months, the Board requires an anchor point. The Board of Temporal Affairs ruled that any temporal reference lacking a quantifiable anchor point constitutes a procedural nullity, and the Board of Temporal Arbitration has applied that ruling since without comment.

"Where the record is silent as to sequence, the Board shall supply a sequence; where the record speaks, the Board shall determine whether it spoke first."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 6, clause 3

The Grievance of Clerk Ondrej Vask

The Board's most cited dissent arises from the petition of Ondrej Vask, a recording clerk of Floor 1188, who in TY 6390 submitted that his own dismissal had occurred before the hearing at which it was decided. Vask argued that the hearing record bore a seal applied on a date later than the date on which his keys were surrendered, and that the surrender therefore preceded the decision that caused it. The Board heard the petition, found the sequence as Vask described it, and dismissed the petition as out of order on the ground that a decision cannot be appealed before it is made.

Vask petitioned again, requesting a determination of whether the second petition preceded or followed the first. The Board accepted jurisdiction and, in an opinion of eleven pages, determined that it had.

Conflicts with the Office of Concordant Arbitration

The Office of Concordant Arbitration, operating under the Board of Concordant Interpretation, has repeatedly asserted that questions of sequence are questions of application and therefore fall to it. The Board of Temporal Arbitration has resisted, and the Board of Concordant Arbitration has been asked to arbitrate the conflict at least nine times. Its practice is to remand the matter to the Board of Temporal Arbitration for a determination of which body first claimed jurisdiction, which the Board has invariably found to be itself.

The Dialectical Review Board maintains procedural authority parallel to, but distinct from, the Board of Concordant Arbitration, and has taken no position, noting that it has never been asked in the correct order.

Records and Disagreement

The Board's register is kept in three recensions, of which the second is authoritative and the third is longer. Scholars disagree as to whether the Board's founding date is TY 4412 or TY 4414; the Directorate of Duration holds for 4412 on the strength of the Annex, while the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation holds for 4414 on the strength of the first entry in the Register, which is dated 4414 and describes the Board as "newly constituted." The Board of Equitable Review has declined to resolve the question, observing that either date establishes the Board as older than the dispute it was created to settle, which is the only point on which all parties agree.

Petitioners are reminded that the Board does not accept testimony given in the future tense, and that all seals must be licked, not pressed.